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shasta | 9 years ago | on: “But he does good work.”

Isn't that mostly because of the legal process? When a guy is accused of rape, he's the one on trial. Mentioning his drug use might be excluded as prejudicial, even though the jury might find it relevant.

shasta | 9 years ago | on: “But he does good work.”

Of course it's not reasonable to conclude that he's telling the truth on the basis of her clothing. But my point is that it's also not reasonable to treat any mention of her clothing as off limits. It's just one piece of evidence.

If a woman is raped, and the guy claims it was consensual, do you think a woman should be able to point out that, "if I had any intention of sleeping with him I wouldn't have been wearing those underwear?" Or should that piece of evidence be excluded because clothing is never relevant?

shasta | 9 years ago | on: “But he does good work.”

Your claim is that P(consent | sexy clothes) = P(consent | not sexy clothes)? Seems counterintuitive. Do you have evidence to support this claim?

shasta | 9 years ago | on: “But he does good work.”

Is there really a big problem with acceptable/legal behavior not being agreed upon? Isn't the problem usually that the guy claims "it was consensual?" Similarly, when police consider what a woman was wearing, isn't usually in the context of figuring out who's story they believe? In other words, the police aren't thinking "well, she wore a sexy dress and followed him to his room and therefore deserved to get raped" but rather "well, she wore a sexy dress and followed him up to his room so maybe his claims that it was consensual are true." I get that you don't want police to blame the victim, but isn't it just as/more important that they correctly figure out who the victim is?

shasta | 9 years ago | on: Being sued, in East Texas, for using the Google Play Store [video]

Patent lawyer or no, you're still more qualified than the average participant.

I'm not sure what criteria you're using to judge that the proposal would be worse for a less wealthy litigant. Surely the proposal would be better in cases where one side is clearly right? The cost of patent litigation is currently huge. The only way a non-wealthy litigant can participate is with lawyers on contingency. No?

But I suspect fixing the legal costs is only a part of the patent problem. My understanding is that cases like the OP regularly go to verdict and find for the troll.

shasta | 9 years ago | on: Being sued, in East Texas, for using the Google Play Store [video]

Wow, a real patent lawyer in a patent law thread. You don't belong here, but I'll upvote whatever you have to write.

I have a comment and a question:

The comment. Summary judgement does not accomplish what I think sheepleherd was proposing. As you say, if you get a summary judgment against you, you go home. That means that a judge has to be convinced that there is definitely no case in order to issue one. What's needed, rather, is a speedy determination of who seems to be in the right. It should not be final but should determine who pays going forward.

The question. What do you see as the problem in cases like this? Or do you see a problem?

shasta | 9 years ago | on: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

> I agree that the UBI should be flat, because anything else is equivalent to changing our tax brackets; and if we want to do that, we should just change our tax brackets.

This was such a dumb sentence in an otherwise interesting post.

shasta | 10 years ago | on: Correlation implies Causation (2009)

This article seems to miss the role of theories in physical sciences. When we talk about 'cause' we understand that to mean that some chain of events, governed by the rules of physics, lead to the result. Yes, those rules of physics were arrived at largely as a result of observation of correlations, but no one is going to propose military coups leading orange harvests as a fundamental physical law on the basis of observed correlation.

shasta | 10 years ago | on: Type Wars

"On the eve of publication, Bertrand Russel wrote to Frege and pointed out that Frege's logical system allowed statements that were ambiguous -- neither false nor true."

This makes it sound as though Russel showed the system to be incomplete, and the reference to Godel's theorem in the next paragraph reinforces the confusion. Russel instead showed the system to be inconsistent, which is much worse.

shasta | 10 years ago | on: Unreal Engine 4.11 Released

That's impossible. Everyone here knows crunch mode doesn't work and you're most productive working 20 hours a week.

shasta | 10 years ago | on: Philosophers using science and data points to test theories of morality

From what I just read, it doesn't even sound that deep. If you ask me whether a good act was "intentional", I'd assume you mean whether the good effect was the purpose of the act. But if you ask whether a bad act was "intentional", I'd assume you wanted to know whether the bad effect was known in advance. That is, there seems to be different connotations for "intention" in relation to good and bad intents.
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